At the current Princess Margaret Hospital in Western Australia (soon to reopen as Perth Children’s Hospital) it can take up to a week to retrieve the physical patient records to allow consultation review. The records are not electronic and may be in use by other clinicians, tied up with another department or incomplete.

Using the bar code ‘plug-in’ feature of MD Link, the Perth Children’s integration team was able to capture the MRN data from the bar code on the Ophthalmology order sheet and the consultation notes are now scanned directly into the Zeiss forum PACS. The clinicians can now review notes from prior visits directly from the PACS versus relying on physical records. This is further augmented using MD Link to query a patient directory (WebPAS, that holds patient records) and returning patient demographics against the MRN. MD Link can then apply this demographic data to make up the HL7 or DICOM message, which associates the scanned Ophthalmic Cover Sheet to a patient. The resulting data can now be stored in the Zeiss PACS, allowing it to serve as an archive for those patient records.

The $1.2 billion Perth Children’s Hospital is being built on the QEII Medical Centre site in Nedlands and will replace Princess Margaret Hospital as the State’s dedicated children’s hospital. As a leading paediatric hospital, it will provide the specialty medical treatment required for the most serious medical cases, as well as secondary services including inpatient and outpatient care and day stay care.